At long last, I've got the tank working. For those who are scratching their
heads wondering what I'm talking about, the tank is the replacement for the
old rc car, which you can drive around over the Internet and watch where
you're going while you do it. I've surpassed the point that the old RC Car
was at for purposes of reliability, although the current revision is not
without its problems, and I'm already working on plans for the next
version.

The tank is a toy 1/16 German Tiger Tank which was remote controlled just like any other RC toy. I took
it apart and basically stripped out everything except the lower chassis and
the the mechanical part of the drive system. I built my own interface for the
motors, controlled by a TS-7200 ARM embedded computer running linux. I use a usb 802.11g
adapter for wireless comunication and an IPcam camera for the visual feedback.

Since I have quite a bit of power on board, I'm going to add some sensors, not
only to help secure the safety of the tank from large inflexible objects such
as walls, but also to add in the option of autonavigation. For now, I'm only
allowing people with a profile to drive the tank. If there is a problem with
abuse, I will change it to only those who have a profile one week old or older.
I will also get the waitqueue working again so a single person can use the tank
at a time for a 5 minute session.

As I'm certain everyone has noticed over the last 24 hours, the server has ...
well.... not been there. This has been most unfortunate, mostly for myself.
I will explain the process I went through to get it working again.

About 4:50 pm I suddenly notice the server is not responding. Assuming the
server has crashed, I order an automatic reboot. This goes off without a
hitch, except for the slight problem that it didn't actually reboot the machine.
But it thought it did. So I order a manual reboot which usually takes a little
while longer to process. In the meantime I do some poking around and discover
that the server is still responding to ssh, but won't let me log in, saying the
passwords are bad. Confusing, but ok. Anyways, they eventually come back and
say the server has been rebooted (again) and is now responding. Only problem
here is that it never went down during that timeframe. However, I'm busy
pursuing the ssh issue. On a lark, I decide to run a portscan on the server to see what IS open. Lots of stuff, but nothing much that should be. And
one of the ports was opened on 31337. That didn't look promising.

So now I figure I've been hacked. Priority now is to get the machine shut down
and off the network before whoever broke in was able to do any significant
damage. Despite the obvious simplicity of pulling a plug, this request took
about 2 hours to accomplish, although I later figured out why. I order a system
restore for the next morning with the old drive slaved, and go to work.

The next morning, the next afternoon and into the next evening, they're busy
trying to restore the system. This includes at first formatting a new drive
and putting it in the computer, booting it and putting it on the network. That
was easy and took less than 30 minutes. Only problem was, it didn't work.
They didn't seem to be able to actually GET IT ON THE NETWORK. So... in an
effort to solve this problem, they replaced and reloaded just about everything.

Eventually, they discovered another problem. There was an ip conflict on the
network. They mentioned this at the time they discovered it, but in my
stuporific state, I somehow missed it right then. It would appear that
this was the reason that my server had gone offline. I was attempting to
get into someone else's box and not my own, and for that reason assumed I had
been hacked. My server in fact was purring along just happily oblivious to
any problems, and as it would appear, traffic.

They fix the ip conflict issue, map the ip address to the mac address and
proceed along happily. Only, it still doesn't work. So, the obvious solution
to this problem is to reload everything again. Still nothing. Finally, the
poor guy who had been working on this problem for the entirety of his shift
forwards it to a supervisor on the next shift. It's about this time that
I discover the ip conflict message and realize what the problem REALLY was,
and I start mentioning this in the trouble ticket. However, by this time,
they're between shifts and nobody's paying any attention. I put in requests
to call me, and start bugging people until the next shift supervisor calls me
as requested. I give him the quick rundown of what happened and tell him what
I figure was the REAL problem we should be chasing. Armed with new information,
he attempts to figure out what went wrong.

Less than an hour later, he comes back and states the problem has been solved
and the server is now live on the network. What happened was, when they
discovered the ip conflict and mapped my ip address to my mac address, that
should have solved the problem right there. However, the mac address they
used was that of the original server, and by this time, the server itself
had been replaced, along with the NIC, so there was a new mac address in
use, and the binding therefore was inaccurate and the end result was the
same.

Once the server was online, I took a look through the old HD to see if there
were any signs of tampering, but I could find none. I took a quick backup
of the important stuff and told them to put the old HD back in as master and
reboot. That took another 30 minutes, and they fired it up, and sure enough,
everything came up just perfectly, no problems at all. DMI was back without
skipping a beat.

ANYWAYS.... in light of this recent scare, I've implemented a 3 tier backup
system. I'll have stuff I backup every day, every week, and every month.
Source code will be backed up daily, most of the website stuff weekly, and
some of the noncritical website components monthly, along with various system
configuration files, and some home directories. I'll keep a couple past copies
here locally for each so in the worst case, I'll be able to almost fully
recover. I won't be saving logs or cam archives, as these take up a LOT of
space and consist of the things I delete first whenever I need more space
anyway.

So there you have it. An explaination of what went wrong AND a news update.
News updates will be more forthcoming in the next few days. I've got a lot
to talk about, just hadn't had the time to sit down and type it all out yet.

Of course, we decided to plan it the weekend that everyone else had a ton of things to do. Of course, there weren't a ton of things
to do when we planned it, the rest of it just came up later. The girls were off school for 3 days, so we jumped at the opportunity
to get in a honeymoon before the 1 year deadline was up. Call it an early anniversary at the same time.

Since the girls were going to need the only reliable vehicle we own that will travel at more than 45 miles an hour, we decided to
rent a car. Ended up with a 2006 white Ford Focus. Nice car. It looks small, but has lots of legroom and trunk room. Perfect.
Drove down to dallas and stayed 3 days at Maple Manor in Room 213. Not the largest room there, but very nice. Once we got settled in,
we decided to just walk down the street and see what we might find to eat. Lo and behold, less than 100 feet away is a Pizza and wine bar.
So we ate a large (like 16 inch) pizza, and drank a bottle of wine and strollstaggered back to the hotel to sleep it off.

The next day, we were served breakfast in bed, after which we got dressed and wandered around Dallas a bit. First we hit the Dallas
Museum of Art. After wandering around there for a few hours and eating lunch, we did some shopping at more conventional retail haunts
like Target and BigLots, then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the night's events. At 6, we went to the Morton H. Myerson Symphony Center to eat dinner at the Opus Restaurant and see the
Dallas Symphony Orchestra featuring John Tesh. Great show,
and that poor girl who volunteered to receive the basketball will likely never raise her hand for anything again.

Sunday we had no plans til the evening, so we wandered around the Turtle Creek, Highland Park area. Ate lunch at an outdoor mexican
cafe, sat in Borders books for a while, wandered through some stores selling stuff which was priced a bit out of our range, and eventually
wandered back to the hotel. That night, we ate next door at The Old Warsaw. Very
VERY good food, live orchestra duet playing while we ate. 5 courses, and a fishtank with an eel. What more could you ask for.
Once again, we walked back to the hotel, went to sleep. Got up the next morning, ate breakfast, cleaned up, and departed.

Several updates are about to be implemented, as soon as I can allocate a swath of time to do it uninterrupted. First off, the visitors
database will be updated.... finally.. with lots of new features. I'll also fix the bug that's preventing new accounts from being
added, as well as causing the database to grow unusually large for no obvious reason. I suspect it's a related issue.

Secondly, I've been revamping the dynamic code for the site. Message replies will show up in a small window below the send form, or maybe
above it, I've not decided yet. That can be a layout issue. I'm going to CSS the main page and add some dhtml features to the
layout. It'll be nice to be able to make certain links grow in size when someone asks a question, and the bulbs will update on the page.
I MIGHT even update the currently active list of cams & devices, and a dead cam will show a useful "not currently online" image instead
of a broken link. I'm hoping to completely eliminate the hidden frame and any need for popups, since both of these things fail to work
quite often now.

Once the bathroom, Tif's sink, and our bedroom is complete, I'm diving full force into electronics work for future projects. Both the
car and the light show I'm planning to build will require some prototyping work first.

Yes, I know, it's been far more than a weekend since the last update. But we'll get to that later. It's been a busy weekend.

On Saturday, we loaded everyone up in the car and drove to Arbuckle Wilderness in Oklahoma. Spent the day driving around having various
creatures drool, peck, and bite at the car in hopes of obtaining a token morsel. Most of them were successful. The giraffes got special
attention. Here are some pics for you to enjoy. Camera #1 and Camera #2.

Then today we went and bought the cheapest handheld gps unit we could find and tried out Geocaching.
It turned out to be as much fun as we expected and maybe more so. The kids are already planning and expecting to go do it some more
tomorrow.

Despite what might appear to be an obvious lack of progress on the site, there just so happens to be an obvious lack of progress on the
site, at least if you consider things you can see and do. I've actually put quite a bit of work in reprogramming some of it to make it
load faster and put less load on the server. That way, should I get hits from a moderately large website, I'll actually be able
to handle it. I've also been developing a multipurpose phone interface circuit. I expect to put some prototypes into effect this week.
Among some of the features on the first run will include the ability to automatically start recording phone calls when a call comes in,
and once I get caller ID integrated, depending on the source of the call, choose to stream it to the world. I could also use this to
automatically block known telemarketer/creditor/unwanted people #'s. If I really get motivated, I'll have it control which phones in the
house ring depending on incoming calls, and certain phones will go dead after a certain hour on weeknights... can't imagine who
those will belong to.. :)

I'm planning to do a moderately substantial Christmas display this year, controllable of course. I'd like to sync it to music, and that
CAN be done, but it'll be difficult to observe it realtime online due to the difference in video and audio streams, and streaming live
video/audio in a package like wmv has proven to be both problematic, and very bandwidth intensive. To view it, I'll be setting up a
mailbox out at the street and it will contain a camera looking back at the house.

I've been playing with ajax, enough anyway to incorporate it into the main page and replace all the functions that the hidden frame
now serves, most of which don't work correctly anyway. This will include the lamp icons turning on and off, popup message and
windows, and a redesign of the camera code to handle broken images and such.

Marjorie goes off to camp today. We'll be comforted in the knowledge that the
location of this camp is a safely guarded secret. At least on the site
for the camp. A child predator looking for a children's camp will thankfully
not be able to locate it, since it is not immediately visible to anyone
visiting the site. Of course, all you have to do to GET the location of the
camp is to register your child to attend, but clearly that is more trouble
than a child predator is willing to go to. In fact, visiting the camp itself
seems like a bit too much trouble. I would think that any strange person
that isn't a parent, counselor, or child would stand out like a sore thumb
and would be immediately reported. But I digress. We must create the
illusion of safety for the sake of the children and the sake of the paranoid.
Your children are far more likely to get a nasty case of poison ivy, or
some other conventional camp related ailment. I wonder if the site fails
to mention that as well.. hmmmmm

Anabelle-Bob had a tooth sticking out, such that it looked like she was walking
around with a toothpick. It was painful to the touch, she wasn't able to eat,
and her breath smelled, so there was some obvious decay issues. Since we
discovered this on a saturday night, and the earliest we'd be able to get her
into a vet at normal working hours would be monday morning, we decided we'd
better take her to one of these emergency vets. Gertie did the phone thing
and we learned another interesting trait about Denison. All the Vets here
are either owned by the same company, or they're some type of Cartel. In
any event, they refused to see us because we haven't previously used a Vet
in Denison before. There were no exceptions to this rule, and the
answering service was quite rude in expressing this. The only alternative was
to drive an hour to the emergency vet in Collin County. So we did. They
were very nice, took her immediately, took care of the problem, and we were
out of there. We spent more time driving than anything else. Turns out,
she had a case of tooth rot, probably had for a while, and the bacteria had
finally eaten through enough of it that it broke off, thus the loose nature.
It came out easy and the vet perscribed some antibiotics and pain killers,
which I must administer for the next several days, at much displeasure to the
cat. She's now a kitty with a missing lower canine tooth. But she's much
happier now. Even after that whole ordeal was over with.

Well, call that an annual event that I'll no longer be participating in. I'll
start with a little background. The Plano Book Fair, which is held every
year during the summer, is a 3 day event where you can purchase used, donated
books for 75 cents to $1.50 each. Each year they have typically around
150,000 books for sale, and make about as much. Proceeds go toward various
library functions for the city of Plano, TX.

The event rents out this huge convention hall for 4 days. 3 days for the
sale, and the previous day for setup. Books for the sale are sorted year long
by volunteers, are boxed up, and warehoused, and brought in on the setup day.
Volunteers at the setup will take a box of books, which are sorted by
category, cut the box open, take the books out of the box, and set them up
on one of the many tables. As you can imagine, this is a task that requires
quite a few manhours to complete. This has never been much of a problem though,
as there are always plenty of volunteers available. As a token of gratitude
for their efforts, the volunteers are allowed to purchase $25 worth of books
on the day before the sale. If you've never witnessed opening night, that is
quite a significant guesture. It can be quite a madhouse.

Well, that all changed this year. With no obvious warning, especially to
the many volunteers who have done this annually for years and don't bother with
signing up in advance, they decided to recind the ability to purchase books the
day before... well, unless you're a "member", membership of which costs
$35. The members get to come in the night before and purchase their books,
and they're not required to do any work for this benefit. The volunteers get
no special privelages at all.

Now, to avoid sounding like a whiny materialistic pig, I agree, it's their show,
they can run it any way they like, and nowhere does it say I'm entitled to
any benefits for this volunteering. I just falsely assumed things would work
the same way they did the year before. Had there been a more concerted effort
to notify the volunteers before they came in and set aside their box of books
for purchase, perhaps we wouldn't have felt as insulted. We probably wouldn't
have worked, but at least we'd understand. Maybe.

To make it more fun, we inquired as to the reason. Several were provided.
On one hand, there were complaints that SOME volunteers didn't work the whole
3 hours that they're supposed to. Clearly, this is a good reason to punish
everyone. Secondly, some of the paying members of Friends of the Plano Library
were apparently upset that the volunteer riffraff were able to select books before they
were, and apparently that tense political issue was taken care of as well.

The simple, not too difficult to read between the lines message that we got was,
we don't work hard enough to deserve to get any books ahead of the crowd. And
if we don't like it, we can just leave. They have plenty of help. I suspect
a lot of their help didn't realize the tragedy of their situation until they
tried to buy their box of books. "Oh dear, I'm terribly sorry about that.
Thanks for all your hard work though. If you want to pay $35, you can join
our little club and come back tonight, and maybe find some of the books you
had picked out. In the meantime, we're going to put these back." And most
of these words are verbatim what was told to us.

On top of all this, they decided that nobody younger than 14 will be allowed
to attend the setup. I've been working there for 8 years and I've yet to
see ANY problems with children. The children, in fact, help out as much
as the adults do. Kids usually aren't dragged along to these things
involuntarily. My step daughter worked two days there last year, and she was
11 at the time. Thursday night, in the middle of the madhouse, she was up
on the stage hauling boxes and bags of books around for people who were storing
them for later retrieval. And she definitely picked out her $25 worth of books,
and spent a good part of the summer reading through them. This year, she was
anxious to go again, begging us to let her skip swim practice for a day so
she could go. Apparently she got the same message the rest of us did. She
just doesn't work hard enough and isn't deserving of the privelage. I was
still considering going down tonight and helping with the crowd, and asked
if she wanted to go with me then, and she'd still have a chance to pick out her
books before the sale started, but she had completely lost interest and wanted
nothing further to do with it.

For that matter, neither do I.

There's a chance that a lot of these problems will be taken care of after
this year. But what's the use now? A lot of the dedicated volunteers, people
who have come there year after year, who got insulted and walked out, probably
won't be coming back, no matter what they do to fix it, if anything. For
me, the magic is gone. This was something I looked forward to every year.
I scheduled vacation time months in advance to be sure I'd be available to
attend. I enjoyed meeting people that I remembered from previous years, even
if we don't talk at all during the year. It's as much a social event as it is
an opportunity to get lots of reading material at a cheap price. All that is
ruined now.

I'm sure the sale will survive without us. They still have some people who
will work it anyways, others will fork up the money and just get their books
that way. But it's not the same anymore. There won't be the same caliber of
people walking around helping the customers. The people that REALLY love it,
loved helping others enjoy it, those people won't be around this year, or
next year, or the year after that. And attendance will start to wane.
A lot of the steadfast volunteers also either donated a lot of books to the
sale, or were involved in arranging donations from other sources. A lot of
that can be expected to dry up. In time, it will be but a shadow of what it
once was. And that hurts a community to lose a resource like that.

So I decided today, I didn't want to spend $30 in gas just to go help out
someone who refused to show any respect in return. I'd probably just end
up speaking my mind at an inappropriate time. No need for that. This will
do nicely. Anyways, I now get 2 more days each year I need to find something
to do with. I doubt I'll have any trouble with that.

I'm going to do this once, and only once. I shouldn't do it at all, but this
issue affects and has affected far too many people, over far too long a
timespan, that I'm going to put it all out for everyone to see, so there will
be no confusion, no misunderstandings, and nobody going "huh huh huh???" long
after this issue should have been settled. I'm going to talk about a troll.
I'm going to give this troll undeserved attention, which is exactly what he
wants. But I'm only going to do this once, and only as an educational exersize.
Now pay attention.

For the last few months, on rare occasions, this site has been visited by
a troll. It's not the first time, and likely won't be the last. But this one
is more clever than most, and therefore has created more trouble than most.
Talking to him recently, he claimed to be a regular in the past, although refused
to provide me with a regular name he used. I did some research and discovered
he used to go by the name an, when he showed a rare thread
of consistancy. Normally he uses a different name on every post.

His gift, should you call it that, is sniffing around to find people's hot buttons,
then pushing them repeatedly. Most of the time, these actions appear benign
from a casual observation. You would never guess he did anything wrong without
a larger contextual view, and lets face it, who really has the time to explore
the ancient history of everyone they speak with. He will intentionally
push someone's button,
the victim will respond in an aggressive, defensive, and sometimes seemingly
inappropriate manner, and the troll will then continue to push the same
buttons, annoyingly so, until at some point he backs away, usually after
getting kicked, banned or otherwise, because he "never did anything wrong."
And an uninformed outsider who had no idea what all took place would likely
agree. And so the troll's legacy lives on.

The troll, any troll, gets his kicks from a response, especially a negative one.
More importantly, the goal is to create discord amongst the regular members
as they get drawn into a controversial topic. Take Shiz for instance. Everyone
who knows him realizes that he has a temper at times, and more times than I
would prefer he will let a rude anon taste a bit of it before getting rid of
the problem. A lot of us tend to feel the same way, so while we might not
react the same way, we fully understand his motivations and generally don't have
a problem with it. The troll will find a way to get the same reaction, only
do so in such a way that nobody else can relate. This makes Shiz look bad to
everyone else. And before you know it, other people join in on the bandwagon
of saying "Yes, shiz DOES have a habit of kicking people out and cussing at them for no reason." Many times, it's the same person over and over again, but it
looks like a larger segment of the population that has suffered the wrath of
Shiz. Now that the troll has gained a support group, that group will continue
to fight in his honor, even after the troll has left.

So who's fault is it? Ultimately, ours. Mine, yours, Shiz's, and everyone
else who bothered to give this troll one bit of attention or one bit of
credibility. It's not a problem with a simple solution, however.
Ultimately, we all need to learn to simply not jump the gun with our reactions.
Be it a troll, or someone making a clueless, but innocent comment, we can
take offense to something seemingly benign. It would be better to respond
to these things in a polite, civilized way, even if the reply is negative.
Keep all illusions of hostility out of the response. Those who simply made
a mistake will either apologize or refrain from broaching the same subject
in the future, and a troll, not getting the desired response, will either
escalate the effort or depart for greener pastures. An escalated effort to
aggravate someone is easier to identify and deal with.

For the moment, I have created trolltags. Currently there is ONE troll listed
in the database. Any caption or comment left by the troll will be marked,
encouraging others to simply ignore whatever he's saying, in hopes he will
go away. Any effort to bypass this tagging will be considered an abusive
action and permanant removal from the site will then be an optimal solution.
I normally would ban trolling outright, but since there is some discrepancy
between the appearance of simple honest discord and outright trolling, I feel
marking those who are consistantly exhibiting antisocial behavior gives them
the opportunity to improve their ways, assuming they wish to. The trolls
will not, will make it obvious, and at that point I see no reason to continue
dealing with them.

So remember, the next time you feel compelled to be drawn into a controversial debate,
be it a negative stance against a member of this site, a political conversation, a
debate about religion, philosophy, the rearing of children, or the fundamental
diatribes of the glowworm mutilation cult... before you get sucked into
a flamewar, mind the source of your outrage. Have your own ideas, don't blindly
follow the crowd. Develop your own thoughts based on your personal observations of
the available facts. Yes. I know I'm not being realistic. People generally
don't work that way. Mob rule, peer pressure, and herding are the way the
world works. You'll have to decide if you want to lead, follow, or get out of
the way. But the next time you're offered the opportunity to take a blind stab
in the dark at someone, at least consider who's handing you the blade.

Apparently there has been the general impression amongst some people that the
site has degraded over the past few years from where it was. To this I have a
simple response: you are absolutely correct. I'll attempt to explain why
and what exactly I intend to do about it.

In the beginning there was me, my house, and my site. I had exclusive control
over the site, all cams, controllable devices, and the visitors page.
Visitors to the site could leave comments, but that's it. The ops could
block users, and manage the chatroom, but that was the extent of their control.
At the time I was working, but I was barely making enough to cover rent and
the cost of the internet connection. The entire site was running on computer
systems that were over 5 years old. Amazingly, it ran quite well, but without
funds to expand, things did so only at a very slow pace. At least at the time,
I had exclusive control over things, so the decision to do so or not was
entirely mine.

Then everything changed.

Having to move out of my house, and having an immediate issue with the place
I was going to move to, and ending up living with my parents, the site took
a nosedive. Suddenly I was running the site off an isdn line and having an
extremely restricted environment to do so. After a few months, I had arranged
new living arrangements where I was assured these restrictions would be minimal,
but that didn't work out as planned and only ended up setting me back further.
In the meantime, the site lost most of the momentum it previously had. After
leaving that place and moving back in with my parents again, I decided not
to find my own place to live, one that I owned, such that I owed no homage to
any roommates or a landlord. The only such place I could afford though was
an old house that needed a lot of work. Thus for another year, the site
had to sit in limbo while I worked on the house.

To make matters worse, I was involved (indirectly) in a lawsuit, which cost
a lot of money and time, not to mention excluding part of the labor help I was
expecting on the house. This meant that by the time I moved into the place, it was barely livable, and priority had to be given to getting bedrooms and other
essential rooms and utilities working. Work on the site continued to limbo.
And since by then my available funds had dried up, I had to get a full time job,
which only cut into my time more. So for the last year, my time has been
fully consumed with my job, my family, and work on the house. What little time
I've had left to contribute to the site has usually been spent in a
maintenance mode, just keeping it running.

The simple fact is, for the last 2 years, I've had very little to do with the
day to day operations of the site. Everyone else has been keeping it going.
So what you see is a result of that. This is not really a bad thing, it just is
what it is. It's not what it used to be, but that's to be expected since
without me running the show 24/7, you don't get to experience the results of
whatever vision happens to drive me. At the moment, I have very little
motivation to do anything with it. That is not to say I don't have ideas.
I have a long list of notes I jot down when I have a chance. Plans of things
I want to implement as soon as I get a chance. But those chances don't come
these days. Too many other things come first, and when I finally get a chance
to sit down at the computer, anything that remotely seems like work just
is not going to happen.

So what needs to happen for this to change? I see several possibilities. I
either need to find a source of funding that will replace my job income such
that I can devote all work time to the site. Advertising on the site paid me $100
after 8 months, so that's not going to do the trick. Nobody's going to donate
a significant amount, and nobody ever purchased merchandise when I had
that option available, so I currently am, and will continue to provide this
site as a free service to the world. It serves no useful purpose, so I hardly
can expect anything in return. I could possibily land a job where I'm
attached to a computer and have very little actual work to do, such that I
can spend lots of time on the site and get paid for that time. While such
jobs exist, and I do put forth some effort to find them, I've so far been
unable to aquire any. I could also either quit my current job or take on a part time job, but both of these would reduce our overall income, resulting in
less funds for the site. It's the ultimate catch 22.

The site does have one decent benefit for me though, it has in the past been a
sort of dynamic resume, one that attracts prospective employers to me: employers that both support the site and my time spent on it, and therefore provide me
with an environment that supports the site well. However, with the loss
of momentum over the last few years, I'm looking at quite a bit of ramp-up
time to get the site back where it needs to be before that option will be
available again. The fact remains, I need to spend a lot of time working on
the site so I will have the time to work on the site. Catch 22.

I can't give you any further answers. There is no plan for the future. Well,
I have plans. I have a lot of plans. But I can't give you any indication which of those plans will pan out, which will be useful, or which you should even
bother to expect. Things might change for the better. Or they may never
change. The site might last forever, or I might shut it down tomorrow.
All you can know is, that it is, what it is. And what it will be, nobody
can currently answer. Not even me.

So make all the comments you want about it. Nothing you say will make any difference.

Well, the gang has all left now. We had plans to get quite a bit done on the
house while they were here, but my job decided that last week needed to be
both the heaviest volume week of the year so far, AND half the employees decided
to have weeklong holiday related illnesses, or quit. We still got the
boards hauled up to the attic and got started on the wetbar, hung a fan,
and Cel made a wonderful live-in maid. Thanks Cel. :)

Living with a bunch of geeks for the last two weeks has inspired me to get
working again on some of the many projects upon which I have been horribly lax for
the last couple years. We've also managed to dream up a few new projects as
well.

There will be an update to the visitor database in about a week. The fields
to be added include the following: photo galleries, date created, selectable options for the primary visitor picture, metar code of the closest airport, latitude and longitude, timezone, date of birth, job, xfire name, zipcode, skype name (yes, there's already a skype field, but I'm stealing one of the unused ones), account status, and relationship pointer to link to the visitor page of your significant other.
If you can think of any other fields that would be useful to add, now is the time.

Several projects will involve google maps. We've had two successful tests
with using GPS and google maps to track the location of someone driving cross
country. I plan on making it an option for anyone with both mobile internet andgps to be able to activate this while mobile. I'll also be putting together
a car computer of my own for this purpose, as well has being able to have a
mobile cam on the site while I'm driving. The social map project that I started
a while back will get started up again, although I'll probably nuke the database again and redefine exactly how various relationships should be catagorized. This combined with the known values of various people's lat/long will make for
some interesting maps.

I'm planning to purchase a 1/16 scale RC tank that should be sufficient to carry
the battery/camera/transmitter around the house, with the added bonus of being
able to climb over most of the downstairs obstacles. Most of the obstacles aren't too severe, room threashold trim and the like, but it would have been enough to stop the other rc car, much like the step in the living room of the old house was.

I'm working on fixing all the Object of the Day pages so they have the new
sidebar and theme format, and then I plan to start adding new ones daily.
The most recent one added was 3 years ago. It's time.